Enema Elegy (A Dirge in Five Flushes)

a ritual.

I light the candle like it matters.
Cinnamon. Bought it on sale.
Let the bathroom become a church,
let the faucet drip like a metronome for sin.
I disrobe like a girl in a story who dies.
Cue violins, cue the swelling ache.

Tonight, I prepare the chalice.
The holy bulb—rubbery, blue.
A cartoon heart.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Insert.

No one tells you
that to be wanted
you must become a room
he can enter without hesitation.
No one writes poems
about the choreography of shame,
about the waltz of water and shit and hope
circling the drain
like prayer beads.

Flush One:
Last Thursday’s pad thai,
and a piece of me I never liked.

Flush Two:
That boy who said, you’re too intense,
as if I hadn’t scraped myself raw
just to feel something like light.

Flush Three:
My father’s silence
folded like a napkin in my stomach.

Flush Four:
The hope that this time
he’ll stay. Or text. Or kiss like
he means it.

Flush Five:
My name.

I sit on the toilet like a throne of forgetting,
squatting above the waters of Lethe,
asshole singing some tiny hymn
to the gods of impermanence.
I am clean,
which is to say: emptied.
Which is to say: good.

The towel is damp,
like the mood,
like my resolve.

Somewhere, he is zipping up jeans
and not thinking of me.
Somewhere, the moon
licks the sky with a white, unblinking eye.

And I—I pull the curtain back.
I stare at my own face
as if it might blink first.
As if it might forgive me
for making a body out of
nothing but openings
and exits.